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Sunday, September 1, 2013

Singapore/Bali trip diary - day 9

Among our
ongoing sources of amusement on the trip: my hopelessly untapped list of
things I brought to do – a big pile of reading material and the DVD of the
Holocaust documentary Shoah, all nine
and a half hours of it (well, I’d wanted to see it for years, but kept putting it off
because of the length – with two day-long plane rides, I thought this would be
the ideal extended window, if admittedly not the optimum setting otherwise for a Holocaust documentary). At
the time of writing, at least half of my reading material is still unread (and
I’ll be irritated if any of that comes home because, of course, more will have
accumulated in the meantime) and I’ve watched a pitiful 48 minutes of Shoah. Still, we have a lot more travel
time in the near future. On the bright side, I’ve promptly written all these
journal entries as I go along, and I’m about as up to date with web reading as I would be at
home (we haven’t switched on the TV even once, neither here nor in
Singapore).

Anyway,
that’s hardly the main priority on our daily agenda. I think today was the
first day of the trip I woke up to daylight rather than darkness, albeit
barely; Ally woke up several hours later, having been up for a while during
the night. We caught the 11 am hotel shuttle into Ubud, and started walking in the
opposite direction from the other day, toward the notorious monkey forest.
Every source tells you to enter with care because the monkeys can be
aggressive; anyway, we’d already had an adequate monkey-viewing experience in
Singapore, so we didn’t bother. Even in the streets around the monkey forest
though, you have monkeys blithely wandering about and sitting in the street,
not worrying about the traffic or anything else, like the kings of the world.
Maybe a few of the monkeys have been trained to act this way to attract
the tourists, I don’t know.

We
wandered the streets of Ubud a bit more, but it got repetitive pretty quickly.
The town is usually described as an artist’s colony or suchlike, but we should
have learned by now that this is inevitably code for endless stores, some of
them perhaps selling items of quality and originality, but most just selling mass-produced crap, and
as a whole offering no real incentive to investigate which is which. As you
walk along, you constantly have to step around the little offerings of flowers
and other organic material placed on the edge of the road, sometimes
accompanied by the smell of incense (we occasionally came across them in Singapore too); the Balinese population is well over 90%
Hindu, and maintaining these offerings and carrying out other rituals and ceremonies can
apparently consume a large part of the day. Some people seem to invest more care into the appearance of the offerings than
others do, although I guess they often get stepped on or otherwise mistreated.

Ubud also
had the first signs of outright poverty we’ve seen on the trip, with women
and their young children begging at the side of the road. There are areas of
Bali where such a sight would likely be much more common, and some people think
coming here is morally tainted unless you’re meticulous about how you spend your money. On the other hand, immigration has been swelling in recent years,
most of it driven by job opportunities flowing from tourism, and it’s plain
that the West itself has lost all practical interest in matters of ethical
distribution of wealth. I wish I had a coherent formula for resolving these problems,
but like most people, we just try to apply our instincts the best we can
(probably far from ideally).

We found
another trail, to the west of the one we’d taken previously, this one going
along a lush river valley filled with coconut palms and studded with impressive
homes. We passed many local kids, often paired off into couples, hanging out
oddly close to the main path; our guess was that custom or parental decree or
suchlike dictates that if you’re going to go on a Sunday afternoon date, you
have to stay in plain sight (one boy at least seemed to be trying to persuade
the girl to deviate from this, but without success). We brought some drinks at
a little store along the way, and a group of women were trying to haggle about
the price of water and orange juice (this seems to me a poor way of applying
one’s instincts, just saying). After they left, the shopkeeper asked us where we
were from, and then asked us whether the women she’d just been dealing with were
from France, which I took to speak volumes about her impression of them. I told
her I thought they were Russian, although I wasn’t sure.

We had a
few more nice views of ricefields along the way, but it soon became somewhat
less scenic, marked more by the noises and activity of everyday life
(motorcycles, as always, being a big part of it), albeit always pleasant and
interesting. Eventually it just turned into a road and didn’t particularly seem
to be going anywhere, so we retraced our steps. We then visited the Blanco
Renaissance Museum, dedicated to the works of artist Don Antonio Blanco, the
self-styled “Dali of Bali.” It’s a helter-skelter collection, consisting primarily
of skillful but unexceptional female nudes, and a lot of outright wackiness,
such as collages devoted to King Kong, Mick Jagger and whatever else might have
entered his head. More context might have been necessary to explain why this
indicated the work of a “Maestro” rather than that of a mere regional oddity.
Anyway, it’s always nice on a vacation day to mix things up a little.

We had a
late lunch/early dinner at a restaurant that felt grafted onto the side of the
gorge, looking down into the river. As usual, after a while, it was just us and
the staff; in general, Ubud feels geared up for twenty times as many visitors
as were there today (well, to be more precise, that’s true for the number of restaurants and retail
outlets, but not as much for the width and condition of the sidewalks). We
caught the last regular shuttle back to the hotel at 5.25 pm and spent the rest
of the evening here. I curtailed my nap and Ally didn’t have one at all; around
9 pm, we ordered dessert, and instead of sharing just one dessert as we nearly always
do, we ordered two and shared them both, so there you go, we’re losing all
restraint now. And we drank some wine. We spent some time speculating about
future trips we might take, which in no way indicates we’re done with this one
yet.